Brian O'Connell

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Brian O'Connell is the owner and founder of CPA Site Solutions, one of the country's largest web design firms oriented exclusively to designing websites and site templates for CPA, accounting, bookkeeping, and tax preparation firms.

Full Name

Brian O'Connell

Display Name

NMiller83

Blog Comments & Posts

"If you are a chiropractor in San Francisco, you are most likely to appear in the local pack of results for a search like "san francisco chiropractor", or if someone searches for "chiropractor" from a computer or cell phone based in San Francisco."

You no longer need to use location in your search phrase to trigger both local and organic listings optimized for location in the search results. In fact if I search on "chiropractor" with no location, I am indeed seeing both local listings, and organic listings optimized for my IP address location.

Additionally in Google Adwords, I am seeing location is more and more being left out of search phrases looking for local businesses.

Great post Ryan. I have a question for you. When I read various posts about Penguin, everyone is talking about, or implying, that a site is getting penalized. Have you seen any sites dropping in rankings for some keywords, but remaining relatively high for others? I have seen that but the terms are not drastically different. I monitor two very close keywords. Let's say they are

Word1 for Word2

Word2 Word1

Both of those were on page 1 before Penguin. After Penguin, one of those dropped 10 pages. The other one dropped 1 position on the first page.

I'm curious if you have seen penalties depending on keyword, and not site wide, or any other input you might have on this.

I haven't read the comments, but we are also detecting a change on June 4. We have had the #1 and #2 listings on the first page for many of our keywords. 5 of our keywords went from 1 & 2 to only 1. 2 of our keywords went from 1, 2 and 3, to only 1 and 2.

This is seemingly contrary to the results you are seeing with less domain diversity on the homepage. However, I am noticing many of our keywords have 4 positions or more on page 2 or 3. In fact for one keyword, we have the first 7 positions on page 3. This of course does support the results you are reporting.

Lastly, I checked our main keyword in Google Webmaster Tools. GWT reports that the keyword had 150 impressions in position 1 and 150 impressions in position 2 from May 15 to June 3. From June 5 to June 13, the keyword had 70 impression in position 1 and <10 impressions in position 2.

This seems to also suggest that something with that keyword changed on June 4, that resulted in it no longer being displayed in both positions as it has had every week for about 2 years now.

Just this week, I found this site with a list of common male and female first names, as well as surnames. The first names list was easy to save and manipulate into a simple ascii text list that I could add. In my case, bidding on broad match of "certified public accountant" was getting triggered for names, such as "Norm Miller CPA".

Some of the first name's were only 2 letters and could be negative's for state abreviations, and other names like "Dakota" could be mistaken for locations as well. So make sure you know the contents of any list before importing.

I can one up your goat keyword. Google thinks the keyword "accountant" is a match for the search phrase "google account", not to mention "free hotmail account", "my att account", "itunes account login" and I could go on and on. In fact in a lot of these cases, the average position was between 1 and 3. It also kind of shows, you can A/B test until the goats come home, but a lot of people don't read the ads anyway....